A Farewell Show and a Move

Hark!

i'd like to share with you two items of note:

I am playing a show at the

Red Light Café
Tomorrow night, Sunday - June 25th

&

I'm Moving To New York in 8 days

Settle in dear reader because I have much to share with you; however, you can read this in small doses if you'd like, but I do hope you read the whole thing.
It would mean a lot to me.
Thank you. 
(all of the smiley happy faces)

Let's address the first item of note because it's the first item of note, shall we?
 

After 7 years of not performing my music, due to a myriad of moments, and hardships, and discoveries, and beauty, too, I am finally getting back on the performing-in-front-of-other-people bicycle again and sharing all of the new songs I've written in the past few years along with songs from my past records. My dear friend, Eric Toledo - the frontman for the outstanding band Quiet Hounds - is opening the show in a rare solo performance. It's going to be magical I just know it. If you live near Atlanta, come and enjoy the show!
 

Doors are at 7 pm

Eric Toledo at 8 pm

Moi at 9 pm

$15 in advance
$20 at the door 
 

Purchase Tickets Here

It's also a farewell of sorts to Atlanta, the city I've lived in since my parents moved to Atlanta in 1983, (and we're nice enough to bring my sister and I along with them). While I love Atlanta, there are now too many memories, and haunted places full of heartbreak, and ghosts and, to put it plainly it simply does not fit anymore. I never want to drive a car or maintain a yard again for as long as I live. So help me all the deities!
 

Which leads us to the second item of note:

My husband, my two sons, and myself are moving to Brooklyn, NY on July 2nd. Yes, this July 2nd. As in 8 days from now.

Why you ask? There are a few reasons and I won't go into all of them, but here is the main reason and I'd like to share it with you here.

Okay. Deep breaths.

As scary as it is to write down and say out loud - I have a big huge scary exciting dream to get a show on Broadway.

It's based on the life of my family and the circumstances that surrounded the death of our mother and the deep ways it impacted the family and sent us on vastly different trajectories. It's a show about how we see the world, and how we can never know what is happening in someone's heart and mind. It's a show about daring to dream and a show about resiliency in the face of grief and pain. It's working title has been The Vitreous Humor and I will not rest until I see this on stage and my vision for it complete. 

(I'm especially interested to finally get to hear the duet I've written for my two ex-husbands to sing. I need to cast two actors to do so and I can't wait to find them.)

I have been thinking about this, and working on it, and writing it, and obsessing over it and talking about it and now it's time to start DOING IT. I keep trying to do it all by myself. I keep hiding it, waiting to learn enough from going school or from a book or a website or a person, so that I can make it perfect first. I keep waiting to get it just right and then I would share it. I've realized now that I need to GET OVER MY DAMN SELF.

One of my favorite quotes is from Ernest Hemingway - I first saw it on a sticker stuck on a storefront door in Paris, France when I was there in the mid-2000s. It read, "The shortest answer is doing the thing." I took a picture of it and it has lived on a wall everywhere I've lived in since.

So. I'm doing the damn thing. 

My husband and children have been nothing but supportive and excited themselves, because they also have dreams that they want to pursue and those opportunities are in NYC for them, too.

The plan was to move to NYC in 2028, but a myriad of moments and circumstances have all come together where the Universe, or God, or the Force, or the simulation we might be in seemed to be obviously guiding us towards this dream. We are going for it. We're jumping in the deep end. 

I need help, though. To have the time and resources to work on the musical whole-heartedly, I could use your support. 

If you'd like to help support me on a monthly basis, like Netflix subscription, but for a Meg subscription I have a Patreon page where you can sign up to support me on a monthly basis:

Meghan Creates Patreon Page

Or, if you'd just like to give money to my cause because you hate monthly subscriptions and autopay, you can utilize the below monetary platforms and that would also be immeasurably helpful.

I appreciate you all more than I have words for. Thanks for following along on this journey with me.

Lovesomely,

Meg
 

Places to give:

Venmo
Cash App
PayPal
 

Henry Miller

Henry Miller would’ve been

The author of me

If we were somehow

Written into being.

A 20th 21st century

Awkward heroine with anxiety.

If I could read my life with clarity,

With a croissant in Paris,

With a cup of tea,

The words of Henry Miller

Dripping with me,

Perhaps I could relax a bit

Knowing everything

Will have

A bit of

Light In 

It.

Tairy Fales (In Which I Use Familiar Stories To Indicate Your Effect On Me)

You are the once upon

A time in a

Land a long

Long time

Ago.

You are the hopeful song

Of the nightingale

For the Emperor

On his

Pillow.

Love, you are the smile

Of the Cheshire Cat

 As he faded

Away from

Alice.

You are the slipper left

On one of the

Steps as Cindy

Fled the

Palace.

You are the spindle of my spinning wheel.

You are the wishing of my well.

How long I shall feel this way

No one can ever tell.

Just like in all the stories,

Those fantastic fairy-tales,

Loving you makes sense

Like finding a puppet in a whale.

Love, you are the beans

In the pocket before

We knew there

Was a 

Giant.

You are the stone in

The sling that was 

Used to bring

Down David’s

Goliath.

You are the feathers of

The wings that failed

When Icarus dared

To touch 

Heaven.

You are the music played

From the pipe the day

The Piper called

All the 

Children.

You are the spindle of my spinning wheel.

You are the wishing of my well.

How long I shall feel this way

No one can ever tell.

Just like in all the stories,

Those fantastic fairy-tales,

Loving you makes sense

Like finding a puppet in a whale.

The moment I laid my eyes on you

I knew you from the start.

The moment I laid my eyes on you

I recognized your heart.

Atoms

(for Jenny)

(Click to listen)

Sometimes I think

I can see atoms

If I squint hard enough

And look out past

What seems to be there

To all the beyond parts

Where colors are

Sort of dancing around

The edges of everything else.

A bit like Lake 

Michigan when I

Look out over it

And feel my toes

Sink into sand

I want more than this housewife life

Where my colors are

Sort of dancing around

The edges of everyone else.

But I will not cry about this.

Okay, I’ll kinda cry about it.

Should I cry about this?

I gotta cry about it.

Hallelujah.

What should I do now?

All my days

Have started to 

Blur into shapes rather round,

Cycloramas of same

Going in circles again.

It’s not that I don’t love you, I do.

I just need to love me, too.

Dirty Old Man

Thirty-two thousand four hundred and thirteen times

At least.

Most likely more

Yet my fingers typed out the numbers as though they knew

So I follow my fingers.

What is it about men and pools?

We are not here for you to look at.

“It’s too bad you have my mother’s figure.”

“How old is she? Boy, she’s really developed.”

“Eesh, look how fat she is; she needs to wear a bra.”

“You need to not wear your shorts like that, pull them up, it’s distracting.”

When the thirty-two thousand four hundred and fourteenth time happens

(and it will happen — it always does)

I will say something at that moment.

I will speak to what it means to know that we are being inspected and observed

By the new dirty old man by the pool, (yes, becoming what he mocked)

As to whether or not our figures are pleasing to look at

As to whether or not our tits are properly held aloft by fabric and wire

As to whether or not we are slender and lithe

As to whether or not your mother had a figure good enough

As to whether or not we are being sexualized by our last remaining twenty-three chromosomes donor

As to whether or not we are enough to be proudly presented as proper progeny.

This meat suit of mine,

My biological mech,

This jumble of cells and magic

This house that holds

Whatever it is that I am

Is not your concern.

Uninvited comments

Will be caught and thrown into a pauper’s grave.

Let your eyes rest elsewhere, old man

We are not here for you to look at.

While In A Cafe Somewhere In A Place In A Time A While Ago

I find that I fade out of moments

and struggle with words I fear are wrong.

Caught up in upheaval,

longing for the ability to keep my eye on the ball.

My dreams disturb me, the players are never right,

all the wrong characters coming and going,

they are kissing my mouth and I blush,

turn around and close my eyes.

Where is the even-tread?

We stare into mirrors lovely, tired, worn and console ourselves with:

pots of colours, 

with notions, 

with idealism run rampant born from a magazine.

I see a girl.

Reciting words to her mother,

"This means family, this means love."

She calls her mother a bitch, stares hard to hurt,

her mother withdrawing in pain.

I watch that embrace.

I hate that girl,

these girls,

those girls 

with their mothers.

They do not know how good they have it.

We have the smoking gun.
We have so much to lose.
We have run hard to ignore.
We have our projections to share.
My revenue is dropping.
My profit is waning.
My status is under review.
My outlook is revised.
Here is a sprinkling of words that mean nothing to you.
I toe the line, I dive right in but without the optimism some tend to pretend.

You light my fervor,
You stop my waning woebegone Sundays on fire.

You tickle my fancy maybe

You speed up my heart,
a low-battery jump start and a
Pop Pop Pop
of my love is jumping out at me.

I would write you a song we all could sing

and hope you'd remember me

but I don't have it in words,

just love.

Purple Dress

(these are song lyrics for a song I have written)

I had this peach dress,

With lots of lace,

That I wore with my pink converse

 As I raced

 Down the hall

With my sister and Noelle Sutton.

And the church looked like a castle

And all the pastor boys were dumb.

And we played with the Holy Spirit

While our mommas spoke in tongues.

But I never liked dresses much

At least when I was young

          Nowhere to put your stuff

          No climbing trees or having fun.

Found a purple dress

In this place

On a corner in Little Five Points.

The light

That October day

Showed it frail, yet showed me regal.

 And Kara tried some hats on

And I tried dresses on one by one

And in the end we both agreed

It should be the simple purple one.

But I never liked dresses much

      At least when I was young.

              Had to look pretty and stuff,

          Too much that could be touched.

Take me back to the streetlights 

The fireflies 

When it was time to go home.

When I memorized

All of the lines

To ‘Girls Just Wanna Have Fun’

And my peach dress went to Goodwill;

And dresses Grandma made? -- outgrown.

And a purple dress feels really different 

When you think it’s for the one

But, I never liked dresses much

 At least when I was young.

Had to look proper enough.

Sometimes it’s hard to run.

I never liked dresses much

 Fabric to become

Stitched in time, moments woven

That can never be unswen.

In Which The Author Describes A Scene Involving Saliva and Horses

Nevermind how the conversation had arrived at its present location, (because it would make you blush, darling reader—believe me—this is averting awkwardness) Philip and Meg were discussing pearls and their origins.

 “The amazing thing about a pearl is that it starts off as a bit of grit or sand that gets stuck in a clam’s mouth. Its mouth? Shell? Shmouth? The clam then starts working at it to cover it with something—anything— because it’s so damn irritating; the clam tries to smooth out the rough edges somehow. So really pearls are just giant phlegmy covered bits of grit.” Meg paused and thought for a second, “I’ve always thought it funny, one of the meanings of my name ‘Meghan’ is ‘pearl’. I used to have a blog called ‘Pearl, the Prickly Pear’.”

 Philip smiled and said, “You, my dear, started off as an annoying bit of grit that turned into…” and here he paused to think up something especially clever, and he would have done so had Meg, stretching her arms up high (and desperately trying to work out whatever her pillow had done to her neck in the night), not said, “…a beautiful saliva ball?” Philip laughed and said, “Yes! Exactly! An annoying bit of grit that turned into a beautiful saliva ball.” (Which, if you happen to know Meg at all, you know this to be just about 83.456789% true.)

 (Darling reader, right now the author must arise from their laptop to go ask a person of interest to remind them of a few details before they can proceed with this story. This is due to the fact that this started off as a spontaneous writing exercise born out of a lovely snoozy naked morning and the children miraculously staying the hell away from the author’s bedroom. Some details have grown slightly hazy and so, once this has been remedied the story will pick right back up—pinky promise. The pinky swear one, too. Let’s cover all the pinky-related covenants shall we?)

 “Apparently I’m a lover of horses,” Philip continued, stressing the word ‘I’m’ more intensely than the others. “My name means ‘Lover of horses’ and that’s IT. I feel like even my name was destined for mundanity.”

 “Oh no! Don’t say that! I used to draw an imaginary boyfriend when I was little, around 11 or 12, and his name was Philip Sterling. I thought the name Philip was the best. Philip replaced my first imaginary boyfriend—his name was Benjamin Moore—until I found out Benjamin Moore was the name of a paint company.” Meg patted her belly absentmindedly and scratched Philip’s back.

 “I remember you telling me about that,” Philip replied smiling and hunching his shoulders with pleasure at the surprise back scratching that had broken out. He paused, “I don’t know…” and here he trailed off for a moment looking out over their front yard, “… if you research my family tree you have a bunch of people who were just sort of middle-of-the-road safe kind of people. All wonderful lovely people who weren’t remarkable or awful; they just were.”

 “Well, if that isn’t what you want, then it can start with you. You can do something remarkable. Why not?” Meg beamed at him. “All it can do is kill you.”

 “Why not indeed?”

 And they both sipped their coffee, smiles visible in the corners of their blue eyes peeking over rims of mugs.

The Darkest Night of the Year: Losing Gryphon Edmund Quinn-Simmons

The very first thing I bought for our son, Gryphon, was a print for his nursery. It’s made by an acquaintance of mine, Robin Plemmons, and it’s a quote by Frederick Buechner that reads,

 “Here is the World. Beautiful and terrible things will happen. Don’t be afraid.”

I hadn’t yet found the right frame for it but I figured I would find something by April. Gryphon wasn’t currently on the outside of my body—he was due to emerge from my uterus at the end of April—April 27th to be exact (though do babies ever arrive on their due date?), so I thought I had time.

Why do I do that? Why do I fall back into the horrible pattern of thinking I have all of this time?

On the darkest longest night of the year, the Winter Solstice, around 8:50 in the evening, in room 900 C at North Fulton, I was given 400 mg of cytotech to begin the process of birthing our son, Gryphon Edmund Quinn-Simmons, at least 12 weeks too early.  It would take 4 more doses and almost another twenty hours before my body finally relented the next afternoon.

“Your body just wasn’t ready to give him up,” the nurses and midwives said, the sadness palpable in everyone’s countenance. All the pain without the beauty of the life after. Gryphon was brought to us wrapped in a blanket and Philip and I sat with him for a time just weeping and remarking over how perfect his little sweet mouth was, and look, his nose is definitely mine. Holding him I could feel my heart straining out of my chest to meet him as I laid him to rest there for a bit.

---

I feel like I have crochet oven mitts for hands.

Sitting here, writing this, an imaginary mirror appeared to my right, and in my periphery I could see my reflection and my reflection was there: me, crossed legged in my pajamas; pale teal hair standing up everywhichaway; laptop balanced across a mustard yellow IKEA Euro pillow; only, in the reflection, my hands have oven mitts on them.

 My reflection says,

 “It’s from all the pain. You’ve held so much pain in your life, burned so many times from what you had and have to handle, and you evolved a way to survive with it.”

Maybe this is why, sometimes I wake up in the middle of the night and I feel like my hands are huge, like they have swollen to the size of my whole self and I could easily touch the ceiling. Touch the ceiling with my huge oven mitt hands. Maybe that’s why.

---

 Monday, December 10th, Gryphon had a heart-rate of 144 BPM. He was moving around and Philip and I couldn’t keep the grins off of our faces. Then afterwards, Lynn, the midwife told us that there was an issue with his umbilical cord. “The ultrasound shows that he has a single umbilical artery or a two-vessel cord. We are going to send you to the Fetal Maternal Specialists so that they can take a closer look.”

 Our appointment was December 20th. At 2:15pm. We went.

---

Coyotes were whimpering, three of them,

Outside my window the last time I think I felt him move.

I think I feel him now even though

Daisy with the beautiful accent said,

“I’m so sorry

I don’t see

Any

Cardiac activity.”

Hands squeezed tight then

Mine inside Philip’s wrapped outside strong

Oceans spilling out of our eyes

Becoming the letter “vee”

The point a waterfall

To soak the fabric of our clothes below.

Here are soundwaves

Visualized for you on the screen

Of a child you will never hear

Of a child you will barely see.

Mia (the midwife I’d never met)

Gives her condolences

From wide brown eyes

Filled with wide deep care

All while wearing a Santa outfit under her medical coat

White pom-poms, like fluffy horns in her dark brown hair.

“I wish I had the right words to say…” she says and

I stare at her Santa boots so black, “sometimes these things happen.”

She cares, I can feel it, but from a long way away.

No activity.

Remember the feeling

Like birds wings

Fluttering on the inside

My bird’s nest

Too early to hatch from.

Much too early to hatch from.

---

 It’s Christmas Eve. The house is quiet but for the sound of Ric Hordinski’s guitar playing “A Little Lower Than The Angels” from Over The Rhine’s “The Darkest Night of The Year”. Check it out. Listen to it with your eyes closed. Then, when you’re done, please do me the honor of listening to the song by Jane Siberry called “Calling All Angels” (and no, it’s not the dumb Train song).

There is so much more I want to say and yet nothing at all at the same time.

Oven mitt hands

Patchwork quilt heart

Reworked and rebuilt

Different from my start, though

Tin Man I am not.

Whiplash

This back and forth motherhood

Leads me to a new blank document

I never saw coming

Because I always think I have time

Why do I do that?

Why do I always think I have time?

How Does One Make Friends at the Age of 14,693 Days?

I desperately needed a friend today. Someone to hear me and see me and let me cry and, I dunno, do friend things that friends do. But I had no one to call. There are certainly people I thought of to call, but I felt I shouldn’t. Or, I worried, what if I think of them as a good friend, but they don’t think that way about me at all? What if I am that person. I live in mortal fear of being that person. The next thought was, who in the hell do you think you are? You haven’t been a very good friend to the few friends you do have, how dare you call anyone now? It’s not that I don’t want to be a good friend. It’s that I have been so intent on trying to survive and work and get food on the table and breathe and not break into a million pieces these past three years that I’ve not reached out and initiated like I probably should. The few times I have gotten my head out of my own ass and initiated contact with amazing people have ended up me being sick with a migraine, or the amazing person cancelling, or my having to work.  Blah dee blah dee bloo. I don’t even have a mom to call and talk to. IS THIS A PITY PARTY OR WHAT. Or maybe I’m just a human lady having a shitty time of it?

Human Lady. Shitty Time.

 This morning was a breaking point for me. Straw and Camel and Back and all that.

After waking up early only to be turned away due to Medicaid issues at what I thought was going to be my 20 week pre-natal appointment; after phone call after phone call trying to resolve the issue; after being yelled at by a case worker, I sat on our unfinished bathroom floor (which is still in shambles from when a pipe burst in our bathroom after a tree fell on our house), in my wet underwear and jeans from where I peed myself from throwing up so hard, my face puffy from weeping and snot being funneled through my face in vast quantities, seemingly from a nothing-but-snot parallel universe, I was absolutely not going to call anyone and dump everything that hurts and is going wrong and is overwhelming me in their lap.

            “Hi, it’s me, Meg. I know we haven’t spoken in forever but I thought maybe you’d be up for helping me survey my mountain of shit while I cry and try not to panic. Doesn’t that sound positively THRILLING?! Here, take my offered hand and prepare for an ADVENTURE!”

I feel like I spend all of my time making sure that everyone else is taken care of. I try to take care of me. But the taking care part that involves me having relationships outside of my house? That isn’t going so well.

It’s hard making friends when you’re my age.

I’m 14,693 days old.

Or, to be less precise: 40 years, 2 months and 22 days, and when one is 14,693 days old, and trying to make it through each day without crying and trying to be a not shitty person, and feeling overwhelmed because you have to figure out what to make for dinner without using too many dishes because the plumbing in your house hasn’t worked for months and the kitchen sink backs up and the dishwasher won’t drain so dishes are washed by hand in the utility sink in the utility closet because we don’t have the 18K to fix said plumbing and your children have homework and you’re worrying you’re screwing them up because you drop the F-bomb way too much and they probably have too much screen time and you should be doing more crafts or something learn-y and developmental-y with them and you need to upload more pictures to all the social medias for the new business you’re trying to start that is exciting and cool in theory but isn’t making enough money to pay for itself yet which sucks because you’re the only one making money at all because your partner has been out of work for almost six months and can’t find a job even though he is brilliant and has a Masters in English and you just had to sit in the DFACS waiting area for four hours for the second time in less than a month to try and get Medicaid coverage so as to help birth the human in your uterus because you can’t afford health insurance which sucks because you currently have a double ear infection and a sinus infection…how does one make friends? When? When does one make friends?

 And say, if I did make friends, who would want to hang out with THAT dumpster fire I just described up there?

 Then there’s the vulnerability of even admitting any of this because then if I admit this, will people feel sorry for me?

 Well gotdangit. I don’t want THAT either. I am a Quinn. We don’t let people see that we’re hurting. And even if we are hurting, there are people that have it way worse. Walk it off. Shake it off. It doesn’t hurt that bad. Distract! Distract! Make a joke!

So why am I writing this? If I were to share this, what would be the point?

 I guess I’m just lonely? I guess I just need to know that I’m not the only one out there who thinks, “Gee. I wish I had a friend like it seems so many other people out there have a friend.” But then I wonder, do a lot of people feel this way?

If you feel this way at all—I see you. I get it. I do. If you’re struggling just to get through the day and you feel like a misfit because you can’t seem to catch a break—I get it. Maybe you could come over, in your pajamas if you want, and we could play Canasta or something. I would need to learn how to play Canasta but I am a VERY FAST LEARNER. Or, if you need to cry and vent first, I understand. I’ll help survey and chip away at your shit mountain if you don’t mind helping to survey and chip away at mine. That’s the great fear though, isn’t it? That what if your offer goes unnoticed? Or isn’t appreciated? Or isn’t wanted? What then?

How does one make friends?

David Ramirez, Drunk Texts, and Guinea Pigs, oh my!

Let me share with you a few tips:

If you ever happen to be at a music venue called The Earl in East Atlanta to see David Ramirez perform (he’s the best) and you’re not currently taking one of your main “makes-your-brain-work-better” meds because you can’t afford it and your ex-husband shows up to the show with his girlfriend and you get super drunk – do not, under any circumstances -- text someone you used to be good friends with, but is now friends with your ex-husband’s girlfriend, about how much you cannot stand said ex-husband’s girlfriend.

You see, you will wake up the next morning with a beastly hangover, regretting the fact that you have to move in order to pee, and you will check your phone and see that you drunk texted this former friend and you will find in that moment that instantaneously all of your atoms have individually developed their own case of severe embarrassment at having to be anything a part of the making up of you.

You will put your phone down and you will stagger to the bathroom and you will begin petitioning to anything bigger than you that you did not see that dumbass text that you sent and that it never happened.  You will look at yourself in the mirror and squint and say,

“I am a grown-ass adult and grown-ass adults do not drunk text people.”

But you did.

You will immediately begin pulling open your brain files for all of the therapy skills that you’ve learned and you will try to figure out what the fuck to do.

You’ll end up texting an apology to your former friend and try to stop mentally berating yourself for doing something so remarkably stupid.

“That was so dumb,” you’ll say to yourself, “but you are not your mistakes and you are not your failures.” This will not stick and so you will spend the rest of the day feeling sick to your stomach.

You will eventually hear back from the person you drunk texted and it will be a novel of a response about why you are a terrible person; it will be full of accusations you don’t understand; you will be told that they feel sorry for your significant other, and will basically hammer home every horrible thing that you already think about yourself.

So.

Yeah.

Don’t do that.

Let me clarify.

You should absolutely, under any and all circumstances, go see David Ramirez perform – even at The Earl. Just don’t get super drunk and text stupid stuff to people you don’t know very well anymore and who have no earthly idea the journey that you’ve been on just like you have no earthly idea the journey that they’ve been on. Make sense?

In addition, here is another tip:

When people choose to believe the worst about you you have to release the desire to fix it. DBT (dialectical behavior therapy) teaches about “willing hands”. You may have to literally stand there with your palms open to show your brain that you are letting go of the desire to try and explain why you did the dumb things that you did. You also may have to stand there with your palms open to show your brain that you’re having to let go of the fact that the movie “Frozen” has forever tainted “let it go” for you, and that you might spend an unnecessary amount of time thinking you should come up with another way of expressing “letting something go” but goddamn it -- it just works.

“But wait! That’s not who I AM! That was an aberration brought about by a lack of medication and poor life choices on an October night at The Earl!”

Guess what?

They don’t care.

And you shouldn’t either. I mean, obviously you should care about any time you find yourself doing something horrible and mean and uncalled for. Of course. But have grace for yourself. Why?

Because when you do stuff like that? It’s usually born out of extreme pain and hurt and it’s like a big ol’ neon sign going off saying, “PAY ATTENTION TO THIS.”

There is a reason you are responding that way and you need to slow down and think about why your body and mind are reacting in the ways that they are.

Another tip:

Talenti’s Raspberry Sorbet is reallydiculous so you should have some.

Erin, my sister, has often referred to me as her guinea pig. Despite the fact that I am also rotund, with a cute face, and people don’t know quite what to do with me, I have also gone forth and had a bunch of stuff happen to me, or done things, that has caused Erin to look at me and say, “Well. I will most certainly not be doing THAT.” I’ve given her loads of things to choose from and it shows; Erin is the white sheep of the family and I mean that in the best possible way.

I say all of this to say that I will continue to share my less than ideal moments with people because, at this point, I have grown accustomed to being a guinea pig. Also, I’ve seen a print going around on the interwebs lately that reads,

“Be who you needed when you were younger.”

So. I am.

I needed someone to talk openly and frankly about mental illness and what it means. I needed someone to show me how to fight the stigma surrounding mental illness. I needed someone to show me that my mistakes and my, at times, truly terrible and emotionally abusive behavior towards other people, did not define me as a person.

You are not your mistakes. You are not your bad choices. Your consequences may linger for a long time afterwards, like an echo, or a really bad fart -- or those moments when you laugh really weird and it sort of hangs in the air and you hope that others didn’t notice how your face just made a noise like a demented foghorn, but those consequences will fade or, even better, blow your mind and end up being freaking amazing.

All that to say:

YOU ARE NOT YOUR MENTAL ILLNESS OR YOUR ADDICTION OR YOUR STUPID MOMENTS.

Have I made myself clear?

(If you or someone you know has a mental illness check out makeitok.org, it's a site that is committed to getting rid of the stigma around mental illness. Also, please feel free to comment here about what you're going through as someone with a mental illness or living with someone with a mental illness. You can also message me privately if that makes you feel more comfortable.)

Midnight Blue Marmalade Man

A switchblade

Open heart surgery

Without any warning

Stumbling around with

Guts hanging out

(Can you see this picture? We were never full of cotton or feathers

or some kind of poly-fiber stuffing.)

Swinging about with threads

Of ourselves

Of pink, and red, and blue

Yet I have this yellow one

I would use

To sew your heart for you.

A goldenrod middle C

Hertz level to help the hurt levels

Tailoring the hem of these moments

To not drag through past transgressions

Brought about by broken people

Doing broken things

Stumbling like myself on those outside stairs

When you saw how I could dance dance dance only a few hours ago.

It was said,

“You are the last thing I needed and the very thing I needed all at once.”

That is still true.

Complex the complexion becomes

With all this talk of jam and jelly

Writing words in a book

On a table

In The Small Market on Hosea Williams

The light coming through at a just-so angle

Enough to highlight the blue in your eyes

To pull out the strength I see there

(yet you say you are not strong

You are, my darling, you are.)

Fourteen thousand conversations at least

Bated breath waiting to have

But never enough time

to do tosaytoplaytowritetomaketogotoseetolovetohold

This is what I know --

A goldenrod thread

In the needle

Cross my heart

Wherever these times together take us

You are a marmalade man, an enigma,

You are a midnight-blue treasure

Trove of redemption and

If the prize was you

I would buy at least a million raffle tickets

Redeem them all for the chance

To spend another evening tall boy drinking dancing to the blues.

-- Midnight Blue Marmalade Man by Meghan Quinn (that would be moi, by the by. My maiden name is Quinn.)

I think it was a conversation with my sister, Erin, in the Spring of 2016 that convinced me to sign up for OK Cupid, but honestly I can't remember. She had been sharing some horror stories of "men" who were contacting her on the OK Cupid app; they were so awkwardly bad and yet simultaneously hilarious I decided to jump on there kinda out of solidarity and kinda out of curiosity. I had resigned myself to the fact that, indeed, love alone was not going to save my marriage. Erin told me that, too. "You need to get over him, Meg. He has moved on, you need to as well." That was a hard thing to hear. If any of you know me at all and my story, you know that the end of my marriage to Zack Arias was truly one of the most devastating times of my life. I loved that man so so much and the fact that it was not returned, the fact that the year before he had already found someone else he liked better, was a blow I thought I would never recover from. 

I summoned my inner Bob and told myself, "Baby steps, Meg. Baby steps."

Wading through the craziness of online dating is not for the faint of heart. However, through all of the detritus, I was lucky in that I met a few gentlemen who seemed nice enough, went on a few dates, but nothing sparked really. Mostly I was going through what Erin was going through which was an inundation of men messaging me who obviously had nothing in common with me and hadn't read anything about me at all. I did my due diligence when my profile was "liked" by another by visiting their profile. This was usually disappointing and resulted in me reaching for a bottle of wine.

July 29, 2016. I had just finished reading the profile of a man who had liked my profile. Despite the fact that that he lived in Woodstock, GA and despite the fact that I wasn't too sure what he looked like (his profile picture was of him playing the drums and looking down and another picture was terribly dark and hard to make out) I appreciated his use of the English language and the fact that he seemed to possess intelligence and wit even in his description of himself. Double points went to him as well for not sending me a marriage proposal, a dick pic, or some sort of monosyllabic greeting along the lines of, " 'Sup" or "Hey" or "UR pretty". So, I clicked the little star next to his user name and liked his profile back. 

"You like each other!" OK Cupid told me. 

Great, I thought, we like each other. 

So a day later I wrote him a little note:

"We like each other. So says this app. So. Let this be the first contact."

A day later he replied,

"I shall. This provides a convenient segue to this being second contact. As the respondent I somehow feel as though the weight of substance is on me. Must write something quality. Have I yet? Sorry I was distracted by thinking of something. Besides we all know man was created in god's image which is why god is so fucked up."

(In that last sentence he was referring to something I had written in my profile about religion)

This is promising, I thought. I wrote back,

"And now this is the third contact. I am still mulling over your last sentence. It makes sense and then it doesn't. Do you mind elaborating?"

"There is something altogether disturbing how, if we were created in god's image, every portrayal of god is so man-like. The statement that god created us in his image almost seems to go both ways, i.e we say we are of his likeness in order to justify him being of our likeness. By doing so we are able to sanction and/or justify mutually agreed-upon goodness as god-like and the opposite of an entirely different ilk. Enter Satan. But that is for further discussion. The outcome (in my speculative opinion, of course) is that god must therefore be arbitrary, fickle and subject to the aegis of the moral majority. This the best I can do in informal writing. I'm much better at connecting the dots in conversation."

Jibbers Crabst I'm actually having a decent message exchange with a man on OK Cupid. My interest was more than piqued at this point. 

"I am much better at connecting dots in conversation as well. At least on topics like this. Your explanation was quite good, actually. For the record I am quite good at connect-the-dots as well and am quite the daredevil in that I use an ink PEN. ;-) So...Woodstock, hey? I live in Atlanta -- in Kirkwood to be precise. I think I was in Woodstock once. Do you ever come into the city?"

"When given reason, yes. I saw Swans at Terminal West little bit ago, braved IKEA, etc. I used to live in Home Park area and Cabbagetown before that. Once I lived in a loft apartment on Mitchell St across from the juvie building and the GA Dome. I haven't been around the city much since I moved back 2 years ago. Kirkwood is west of the city, right? Near Ormewood?"

"It's actually east in between EAV and Decatur."

"Ah. That's an area I have little experience in. Went to downtown Decatur a few times to see shows at Eddie's Attic but that's about it. Unless that's not Decatur in which case I'm totally lost. I believe I have seen a band or two at the Earl also. My time in the city is a little blurred unfortunately and it's been almost 10 years."

The fact that he lived in Woodstock did not deter me. I sensed something special in this man. Did I know what he looked like? Nope. Did I care? Not really. My gut was telling me to follow up on this. There is something here, my gut said. I agree wholeheartedly, my brain said. Well, since we're all in agreement I told myself, I'm going to ask him out. 

"Would you like to remedy that? Meet me for drinks?"

He replied that he would be delighted to and after some back and forth logisticating we settled on meeting at Johnnie McCracken's in Marietta Square on August 9th at 8:30pm. He said his name was Philip. I told him my name was Meg. We exchanged phone numbers. 

"See you then," he wrote. And then, about an hour later he wrote, "Happy emoji."

The evening of August 9th I think I tried on about 17 different outfits. 

Okay. Maybe more like 6. I don't even have enough clothes to make 17 different outfits. 

Okay. Maybe I have enough clothes to make 17 different outfits but they'd be comprised mostly of ratty ol' t-shirts and pajama pants.

I digress.

THE POINT IS I WAS NERVOUS.

I met Philip before I realized I had met Philip. When we met I thought his name was Ryan. 

Let me 'splain.

I was driving around looking for parking and messaged Philip to say so. He replied to say that there was parking behind Johnnie McCracken's which is where I happened to be parking at that exact moment. 

"Great! I'm already here and parking!" I replied.

I got out of my car and saw that there was one of those old parking stations with the little slots where one is supposed to stuff cash in according to the number where one's car was parked. I didn't have cash. 

"You don't have to pay for parking after 6pm," I heard a voice say to my left.

I looked over and saw a handsome man with glasses standing there with a PBR in his hand. Black t-shirt with Buddha playing a guitar on the front. Jeans. Converse. Cute. I really hope this is Philip, I thought to myself. I smiled brightly, extended my hand and said, 

"Hi! I'm Meg! Are you Philip?"

He took my hand and said -- well, let me clarify -- I thought he said, "No, I'm Ryan..." at which point I kind of tuned out and went back to my car to get my purse. I needed to reserve all of my energy on the person I was there to meet, not some guy named Ryan helping out women with their parking woes in the back parking lot of Johnnie McCracken's. 

"Well, thanks so much for your help! I appreciate you letting me know about the parking."

I began to walk towards the pub thinking that any minute this man would veer off and join whatever he group of people or person he was there with. I thought perhaps he had been in the back patio area, saw me staring at the parking thingy, and thought to help.

But no. 

He followed me up the stairs and inside. I turned and thanked him again for his help and began scouring the bar for Philip. I wasn't sure what he looked like. Would he recognize me? 

Ryan stood next to me for a bit while I looked around, trying to ignore him, and then he said,

"Um. There's an area up front that's more of a dining area if you'd like to sit there or I've been hanging out in this little room on the couch. Where would you like to sit?"

It hit me then.

This was not Ryan. This was Philip. I had been acting aloof and had donned my polite-with-strangers-but-have-no-intention-of-making-conversation-Meghan persona. This was the wrong persona.

I quickly tried to rescue the situation.

"'Cause you're Philip, right?"

He looked confused.

"Yeeesssss."

"HAHA! I knew that. I was just kidding. I have to pee."

I took off for the bathroom where I did not pee, I just stood in front of the mirror and grimaced at myself and said, "How did you miss that? Great way to start things, Meg. REALLY GREAT."

I walked out and sat down on the opposite end of the couch where Philip was sitting and began the arduous process of making small talk. That very quickly turned into not small talk. He made an Eddie Izzard reference. I fired one back. Our eyebrows raised. We moved closer together on the couch. We found out that we both attended all kinds of shows at Miracle Theater and shows at The Strand in the 90s and that we knew a lot of the same people. We had been standing next to each other at Prayer Chain and Violet Burning and Sunny Day Real Estate shows for our teenage years and yet had never met.

"I do hope you don't think me too presumptuous, but would you be interested in coming back to my place to continue talking?"

I didn't think that was presumptuous at all. I followed him home. We hung out for a bit and then he suggested that we jam. He jumped on the drums and I grabbed a guitar and we played and I sang and I just reveled in the fact that I was having a blast playing music with this man I just met but felt like I had known for forever.

I left around 3am. He kissed me goodbye. It was a really good kiss. A gentleman's kiss. Do you know what I mean? I felt...safe. Concerned for. Seen.

It would be two nights later, when we were hanging out again, that we connected the dots on how I messed up our introduction. 

"I thought you said your name was Ryan!"

"OH. That makes so much more sense now!" Philip laughed. 

"What did you say?"

"I said, 'No, I'm just a random man offering unsolicited parking advice to a lady in a parking lot."

Which, now that I know Philip the way that I do, makes me laugh even more because it makes perfect sense that he would respond in such a dry humor sort of a way.

He wrote me a song. He wrote me words that actually said something. I mentioned him indirectly in this blog post.

Why am I writing this?

Because we've known each other now for one year and two days. We've been pretty much inseparable ever since. Because the moment I let go of something that I didn't need to hold onto anymore my heart was able to heal, and in the healing I was open and able to receive a gift in this man that I cannot quantify. There aren't words. The next chapter of my life started the day I met Philip, or maybe the next book of my life. His voice is midnight blue in my head and he is sweet and bitter and yummy and unexpected. 

There is so much more I could write about his strength and kindness and sense of humor and intelligence and talent and way of looking at the world. So much I could say about how well he loves me and my boys. He is a treasure. He is a gift. 

So. That's all for now, I guess. I wanted to mark this time. 

Life is very hard and very good all at the same time. Sometimes the things in your life you would have never ever chosen for yourself end up being the best things to ever happen to you.

Can you relate?

P.S. Erin will most likely kill me when she reads this but -- If you happen to be someone who has the balls to be in a relationship with a kick-ass single mom of four kids, who is funny and beautiful and quirky and smart and tough as nails, and who is my sister, Erin, let me know. She has had the WORST luck finding someone worth her time. Oh, and you must love Jesus. She is a very dedicated Christian. But seriously -- she's a lot like me only way prettier and in possession of some crazy strong willpower. Erin sees a cookie? Meh. Probably has gluten and dairy in it and I don't need it, she says to herself. Meg sees a cookie? OOOOOH. COOKIES. I EAT COOKIES. I PUT COOKIE IN MOUF AND GOBBLE IT ALL UP.

Stones of Remembrance

The stories in the scriptures

Where he or she or they

Gathered rocks to build monuments of remembrance

To mark a moment in time

The notable

The painful

The important

The beautiful

Have made their way into my head.

And I know

That if I were to build my own rocks for you

They would be like

The Great Fucking Pyramid of Giza

Figuratively

On par with the Mona Lisa

Mount Everest sized

Too high for eyes.

You were my prize and I yours

Outstanding among ten thousands

Light of my life

Knife of my heart

Maybe I will miss you forever.

Jenny and Cheese Grits and Jiggly Bits and Thinkings and Bad Punctuation

It’s been at least 730 days and most likely a lot more since I have seen sweet Jenny from Michigan (I wrote a song about her called "Atoms" -- maybe one day I'll share it) and yet today, after all those other days that have passed, over her picked apart breakfast quesadilla, she says to me something along the lines of,

“Are you sure what you’re holding out for is because it’s what you want or because of the story?”

I think I stared at my cheese grits. I think I stared at the place above her head.

I think I stared right down into myself.

This is what I have learned:

If you have a modicum of connection with someone; if you have a semblance of chemistry and physical attraction and enjoy being with them, then you can make anything work.  

But what about passion? What about love?

Perhaps it’s impossible to stay “in love” with someone.  It settles down, that love. It burrows into you and, if you forget to choose that person everyday, if you stop remembering that they are another human person who cannot fulfill all the places in you that you thought they could (whether conscious of it or not), if you start thinking that their mess-ups are somehow directed at you, well – then it’s easy to give up.

Even when you’re trying. Or you think you are. Sometimes your very best at the time simply is not enough for your other person. One of you is trying more than the other and vice-versa and it seems too hard to try and synch up the trying.

It’s easy to fall in love. It’s hard as fuck to stay there.

It’s easy to find yourself connecting with another person. It’s hard as fuck to remember the love and the connection. It’s hard as fuck to keep choosing to choose them.

Dirty underwear.

Dirty dishes.

Dirty house.

Dirty hearts.

Dirty hopes.

Everything filtering through

Our separate filters

Of what is right

Of what is wrong

Of what that should mean

Of what they should’ve known

A man was watching soccer on the T.V.

At the bar at Brezza Cucina and quoted,

“If you don’t understand my silence

Then you don’t deserve my words.”

But is that truth?

And then we’re sick.

And then he’s sick.

And then you’re sick.

And then you’re both happy in Paris.

And you’re sad in Oregon

And he’s upset in North Georgia

And you’re crying because you made a mistake

And it’s scary to say you’re scared

And he’s angry because he wants what he thinks you got to have

And yet you didn’t really want it – it was a night you hate.

And then the bills.

And then the calendar.

And the kids.

And then their parents.

And then your anger.

And then his disappearing.

And then your (you’re) trying and failing.

And then his trying and failing.

And then the words.

And then the not words.

And then can’t you see I’m reaching for you?

And didn’t you know how much you were hurting me?

And yet he met you on the porch with the music and the wine and the porch swing and the chair and you could see a way through.

And you thought he could, too.

If I could draw a picture of this everyone who saw it would understand.

We have all been here. There. Everywhere.

Where two are gathered together eventually someone is going to be in a lot of pain.

I’m hurting you’re hurting we’re hurting we hurt.

And if a bomb didn’t know it was a bomb

Went off; blew everyone to bits, including itself,

What does that say about the bomb?

Do any of us really know what we are these days?

I saw myself as crawling up a mountain and all you could see were the rocks that were hitting you in my wake.

While you were secretly mapping a new way

I took for granted that what we had was invincible.

I thought we were invincible.

We could still be invincible.

Tell ‘em David,

“We could be Heroes.”

And then you meet a person.

And you weren’t expecting to meet a person.

And it’s easy.

And you think to yourself,

“This is lovely.”

And your heart shakes its head and pinches its forehead

And your brain shifts in its seat and looks at you knowingly

And you look back and say,

“What?”

And they say,

“Again?”

And you say,

“What else am I supposed to do? I was easy to love once. He put it in a picture, on a train, in the middle of the night. Perhaps I can be again.”

It hits you then, that yes – you are easy to love.

You stop waiting for someone to tell you you’re loved and you just decide to love yourself.   

THAT IS HARD TO DO.

But then Jenny is sitting there, all aquamarine eyes and talking of the Good Book, and making you laugh and the cream in your coffee is still swirling and waiting for a spoon and you think of the man with the drums and the glasses and the big big heart who sends you songs he’s written who uses “ameliorate” in a sentence who does better accents than you who suffers from a Catholic-like contrition who makes benches for an animal hospital who tries to roller skate and shares his nachos and who tells you you’re beautiful and tells you you’re amazing and tells you he likes you a lot and yet you realize he knows nothing about you (does he really want to?) or your broken broken broken heart and your mangled mangled mangled life and you imagine walking up to him, holding a shoe – maybe one of your favorite red boots – and saying,

“I am a complicated literal bi-polar woman who loves hard, fucks up a lot, night owl who suffers from insomnia, who suffers with out of nowhere migraines, who feels too much and thinks too much and imagines too much who used to be so so angry about all the wrong things and is learning how to not be angry and be grateful for all of the right things and yet who is TRYING SO GODDAMN HARD TO DO THE FUCKING BEST I CAN. I have jiggly bits and not so jiggly bits and nice tits that sag a little and blue eyes and I can sing and I like to dance, maybe not well but I like to dance, and I like to make things out of bits of paper and I like to paint googly-eyes on thrift store paintings and drink cheap beer in the wee hours of the morning and sometimes I cry and then get mad ‘cause I cried and I don’t sweat in a pretty way, mostly I turn red and just look weird, and I snore and my hair turns into really bad art installations in the middle of the night, and I’ve made two people in my life – one out of youth and one out of deep deep love -- and I’m stinkin’ proud of both of my peoples and I’ll most likely be a really adorable old lady and I can tell a good joke and I don’t laugh I cackle and I’m smart and I read and I start things I don’t finish and I finish things I didn’t mean to start and I am the villain in someone else’s story and a hero in someone else’s and I stand in the middle of this doorway between when I was born and when I will die and I AM JUST TRYING TO FIGURE OUT HOW NOT TO FUCK MORE THINGS UP.”

This is where you imagine dropping your red boot on the ground and then you say,

“There; the other shoe just dropped.”

Jenny is watching the video of him playing the guitar and I say,

“Watch, he’ll smile at the camera in a bit; I love that part.”

I will be 38 in five days.

What have I learned?

We are all just walking each other home. We are all doing our best to survive. We are all trying.

$50 that I do not have...

...and so therefore I still have this website.

Great.

I had forgotten I had it. 

I suppose there was a part of me, somewhere in the back of my mind, the part of me that creates and writes and has things to say, that part of me still knew this was here. The me right now, the me that is doing my darndest to merely EXIST, had forgotten. Right now I think about things like, "How old is that deli meat and if I eat it will I die?" or "Ramen noodles four nights in a row is an adventure!" or "Let's turn this 'how in the HELL does MARTA work for anyone in real life?' into a game!"

So, when the $50 annual charge from Squarespace showed up in my bank account I thought, "Well. There's that. Now what?"

This time last year I was blissfully unaware of what was about to come. There had been trouble in my marriage but I thought, like all marriages, that we were going to come through it. I was terrified of the fact that I was turning 37 soon. I really thought I wasn't going to make it.

I was preparing for my play, "The Vitreous Humor." I had scratched most of what I had written and was starting over. I was crawling out of my skin. I was a wreck. But I had my family. I had security. I had the love of my life. I was going to be okay. We were going to be okay.

I am sitting on a front porch in Kirkwood, a neighborhood in Atlanta. It's the front porch of a house where I have stayed for eight months now. A little apartment in an old house. The people who live downstairs rent rooms by the month. My brother, Asa, and I are roommates. We just recently found out that there is a coin laundry in the basement that we can use. That was a happy day -- we had been going to the Medlock Laundry to wash clothes. What a luxury it is to be able to walk downstairs and wash clothes in the same place where one lives! 

My youngest son, Hawke, right now is inside with Asa. They are watching something on YouTube and laughing. I can hear them. Laughing. 

I do not have my piano here. My soul carries that like an anchor. I play my guitar but it is still foreign to me, even after 17 years of playing. My piano is where I think. My piano is where I go.

I do not know how to stop loving my Beloved. I love him more than I have words for. Even now, after all the hurts, after all the "time to move on's", the sight of him lights me up. Everyday I send him all the love I have. I imagine it shooting up out of me and making its way to him, wherever he is, and misting all around him.

Happy. I want him to be happy. If that is without me, then so be it. I love him anyway. I choose him anyway. My husband is the best person I know. He outstanding among 10,000. He is my favorite adult. I love him no matter what. Ever and always.

Throughout all of this though, I have also learned to choose myself. I know that I am strong. I know that I am more than the mistakes that I have made. Somedays, like today, days when it feels like life can't get any worse, I breathe deeply. I hold gratitude close and closer. I pick up each little joyful and beautiful moment and I dwell on that. 

I was never taught how to do that before. I am teaching myself now. I spent too much of my life allowing my pain to control me. Allowing my fear and my anger to rule me. No more.

I can feel the tension in my brain. The tension of the stress and the hurt and the pain and the longing for my family. I feel that I walk a tightrope of just barely making it. That there is an abyss on either side of me that would be so easy to fall into. So I will myself to keep my eyes on the other side. 

I believe in myself. I must. When I am old, I will be able to look back and say, "Shit was fucked up. In my pain and ignorance and pride I ruined so much. But I did not give up. I did not lose hope. I hung on."

My friends, we are more than our mistakes. We are more than what people say or think we are. And when someone who knew me then walks up to me with the old clothes I once wore and tries to put them on me again, I will smile and decline and I will love them anyway. I will choose to love myself anyway.

And if, when you see me next, and you ask how I am doing, and tears spring to my eyes unbidden, don't worry. You see, I have so many tears I spent so many years trying to hide, that I give them all the freedom in the world now. 

It's not you; it's me. And I'm okay with me.

What about you? Are you okay with you? Is there a someone, or people in your life, who are still trying to put you in your old clothes?

(Quite a few of you have written saying that you'd like to help. Two months ago, when I was laid off from my job, I started a GoFundMe campaign, which was/is very humbling. Friends and family rallied around me and raised over $3000. Now with my car breaking down with a $2800 repair bill AND my expensive electric bike being stolen this past Saturday, any little bit extra can help. All money is going towards my car repair bill.)

https://www.gofundme.com/248hz6c

Homesick

Slit myself from the base of throat

Right where five initials rest

All the way down to where you used to kiss me.

Peel the skin off, strip down to my very bones;

If you look closely

My love for you

Is etched on every one.

The joke that I was too happy

To write sings to song.

Something to write about now,

The went-ings of wrong.

Music box heart;

Open it up

Watch the dancer there.

Say, “I am enough.”

The lights are floating in the glass

Outside

You are floating in the sky

Outside

Homesick hearts, both of us,

So lonely

Not so far apart.

Back is bruised, literally,

From flipping upside down

Clinging to fabric

In an effort to push

Into and then out of fear.

Would talk to you about it

If you would listen.

You are in there peering from behind bars

Put in place in secret

While we were both looking the other way.

Smash the examples, any one you want,

Into powder and I will

Carefully cup my hands

Pour it all into a bowl

Called Love

Watch:

Add water,

add honey,

add love,

add tears,

add whiskey,

add wine,

and hope,

add years.

Mix it all up

Put it on the wheel,

Spin it into a new thing,

Fire it into a new thing.

No matter how many times

We might break each other

You will always be the one

I will want to form anew with.

How many different iterations will we take

On this journey together

Around this star?

Every morning

Waking up

To meet each other again

And every night

Holding close

And choosing the other

Again

Again

And

Again.

Starbucks on 14th Street (a ramble of my brain)

Am I a sociopath?

Would a sociopath wonder if they were a sociopath?

Do I process the world the way I ought to?

Is there something wrong with me?

What is that beeping sound?

I hate bad jazz.

Blinking cursor.

Blinking cursor.

Fucking cursor.

Fuck.

Why didn’t I bring any headphones?

That man is burping.

That lady is chewing her fingernails.

Melanie said she thinks that the inside of my brain

Must be full of rainbow slides and crazy colours.

“I am amazed at how your brain works,” she says and I laugh.

“Actually there are a lot of thunderclouds and lightning, too.”

Thanksgiving.

Time with family.

Will they still be my family this time next year?

The man I love tied me to them but,

if he cuts me loose from him,

if he chooses to give up on us,

I will lose more than just him.

My beloved.

God. I love my husband so fucking much.

Am I a genius?

Why must I care?

Why do I compare myself against others so much?

Writing.

Writing to write.

Popping in my ear.

My hands are shaking a bit.

Tightening my butt muscles while sitting down.

Kegels.

Pause for Snapchat.

All the art I want to make.

All the time I want to create.

All the words I want to write.

All the love I want to make at night.

All the hurt I want to heal.

All the trust I want to build.

All the walls I want to scale.

All the seas I want to sail.

Catch up. 

Catch up If you can.

Don’t worry about the grammar

Whether the words are right

Just write and it will be right

Just write and what is left

Will be your empty brain

And the sound of a heart at rest

No pen in hand.

"The quaking and popping," he says,

Off to my right,

At a table in the night.

St. Arbucks a safe haven

The McDonald’s of caffeinated

Over priced espresso.

Sit here.

Sit there.

Staring staring staring in to devices.

She remarks about something.

He rests his head in his hand.

And GODDAMN what is that sound?

Is this really the time to ground

The beans

For the caffeine?

I can feel my knees through the holes in my jeans.

I just spent one hundred eighty-three dollars

And change

On bras to hold my tits up.

Jayna always hated the word, “tit”.

Tit for tat.

Tat for tit.

Bit the bat

But the bat won’t bit.

Photography

Photography

Photography

My photographer can’t see me.

My brain won’t stop.

How to slow it down?

How to slow down the clown?

What is sown in the rest

Of my life in a space

Full of tragedy and comedy

And every kind of waste

Full of nonsense

And every kind of chance.

I am not my evil words.

My temper.

My face.

When it falls into disdain,

The face that masked pain.

Your pain.

So real.

I expected too much of you.

You wanted too much from me.

But I love you all the more.

I love him all the more.

He is my person.

You are my person.

He and you are the same person.

I’m getting my pronouns confused.

Because there is only one you.

You

You

You

You

Me

Me

Me

Me.

Sips hot tea.

I have flashes of moments where I know – I just know – that I’m great.

That I’m amazing and lovely and worth it and worth the wait

But then I fall back into

Feeling ashamed of feeling worthy as if

How dare I think I am worth any of this?

Where does that come from?

Where can I make it go?

So far from me

So that I can finally grow?

I will become the better me.

I will learn how to be

Radically accepting

Wisely in mind

Not ruled by emotions

Or just my logical side.

I wish he could see me

Loving him here.

I must learn how to see myself.

Let that be enough.

Learn to love myself.

I must love myself.

No matter what.

Volcanoes and Poisonous Trees :: I Was An Abuser

I was emotionally abused for years.

Years.

For as long as I can remember nothing I did was ever good enough. The mental and verbal abuse was awful. 

Nothing about me was right.

I felt all the wrong things and never at the right times.

Sit down and shut up.

Who the hell do you think you are?

You’re never going to amount to anything.

Nothing you say is worth listening to anyway.

You like to perform, huh? Why do you like to perform on a stage?

Probably because you’re a narcissist or something.

What the hell is wrong with you wanting to be on a stage?

You think you’re smart but you’re really not.

You’re just an imposter and everyone knows it.

You’re fat and you’re ugly and you’re not worth loving.

Sure. Real nice idea. It’ll never work.

Oh great, pulling your hair out again. You're so gross.

Oh great, biting your nails again, what are you? Five?

Oh great, playing with razors again. You're so weak.

People don’t actually like you. They just put up with you.

You know, they’re just too nice to say so.

They just put up with you.

Life would be better without you messing things up for everyone.

Your life could’ve been great.

Your life should’ve been awesome.

They just put up with you.

Everyone puts up with you.

They just put up with you.

On and on and on.

My abuser was -- is?—me of course.

Myself.

Years of this and I didn’t know how to stop it. On top of this was my endless rumination on past hurts, past moments, past regrets. I ruminated on what I could never change instead of focusing on moving forward.

Rage would build up in me and, like a volcano, I would blow.

My fire raining down on my husband first. A torrent of abuse towards myself that grew into a torrent of abuse towards him.

It was never intentional. But. But. But -- instead of learning how to stop the eruptions, I wasted time trying to build channels to direct the heat away from him, away from our kids. It was exhausting trying to keep from erupting and then furiously digging channels when I did.

I was, and still am, so ashamed of myself. I had grown so accustomed to the heat myself, my “skin” so scarred, that I could not see how badly it was burning them.

A leprosy of the heart.

Our home became one of eggshells. Everyone, including myself, stepping around gingerly, to not cause a crack. Do not cause a crack because then the whole thing will fall down.

One night my beloved husband, Zack, with tears in his eyes said, “I didn’t kill your mother. I wasn’t there when your life was hard as a teenager. I wasn’t the one who abandoned you. But I’ve become your punching bag.”

“Beautiful; talented; intelligent – and as mean as a snake,” he said another night.

I could not hear him for the roaring in my ears.

He was right, of course.

I scared myself with how easily I could turn on a dime. My Hyde overtaking my Jekyll. My Hulk taking over my Bruce. Never knowing when all hell would break loose.

It was a night in early July when the eggshell house finally broke. Where all the channels I had been building turned to dust. Where the ash of my own fucking pain was wiped away enough to see how badly, how very badly my husband was burned. How hard he had been trying to love me through the lava.

And so here I am, almost five months later, and I am trying to rebuild the house I burned down.

I am an emotional abuser. I am an abuser.

I was an abuser.

Learning how to forgive myself.

Hoping that those I love can forgive me.

I am hopeful and scared and joyful and terrified all at once.

You see, I have a way forward. The poisonous tree I had been trying to cut down with a proverbial butter knife is now being laid waste by the proverbial chainsaw I have learned (still learning) how to wield.  

Volcanoes and poisonous trees. Channels and chainsaws.

My friends, I fear I have lost everything in this burning. The house that I turned into eggshells is gone. Nothing but a place full of rubble now. Now to clear it.

But what will be built in its place? Will we survive this?

I am hopeful. 

_________________________________________________________________________________

She started shooting herself first.

With a silencer

Round after round

Into her stomach

Where the bullets piled up

And weighed her down

Scar tissue growing around them

Till the hardness felt normal

Became a comfort

To feel the numbing

Of mental bullet verbosity.

She started shooting herself first.

With a rocket

Round after round

Into her head

Where the thoughts rattled off

And flew around the rooms

Till the shrapnel felt softer

Became a blanket

To cover the bleeding

Of words running silently by.

She started shooting him next.

With a love letter

Round after round

Into his heart

Where the missives stacked up

And paper cut-ted his aorta

Till the slicing felt subtle

Became a caress

To wipe away longing

Of ever being a good enough good enough.

She started shooting him next.

With an armament

Round after round

Into his hope

Where the missiles laid waste

And covered the land

Till the soil grew weary

Became a desert

Too parched to find meaning

Of fighting without much life.

She started shooting the children last.

With a projectile

Round after round

Into their lives

Where the worry grew wild

And covered their eyes

Till the light made them wary

Became a blindness

To stave off the hurting

Of walking so as not to tremble her earth.

Violets (Live in my Dining Room)

In going though old recordings of mine from years ago I stumbled across this song that I recorded in the dining room of my little duplex on Clairemont Avenue the summer of 2006. I wrote this song nine years ago and it feels oddly applicable to my life now; I am a prophetess.

It was sometime in the wee hours of the morning that I sat down and recorded myself singing and playing a new song I was working on. I rarely write songs on the guitar and so I was particularly invested in getting the song "captured" as it were. I used GarageBand and only the internal mic on my laptop. Afterwards I went back in and added some accordion (badly), backing vocals, and some piano. I love the ambulance in the beginning; I almost stopped the recording to wait for it to pass but decided to plow on. I'm glad I did.

It's best listened to on headphones.

I love this little song and I just thought I'd share here for posterity. 

Here are the lyrics if you're so inclined:

You are no closer to better

Look at the tumbling

Ground is broken

Please don’t come any nearer

You burned up in your leaving

Careful, you might not get better

Just ‘cause you moved

Your location

Still you will write all your letters

And hope for change

But don’t change too much

We tried, we tried

But those violets died

You only see me in fragments

Bits and pieces

Under your lens

How could you even have noticed?

When you only

Saw everyone

Else?

Everyone else.

We tried, we tried

But those violets died

I tried, I tried

And now you hide.

Kintsugi Airplane

Nights with lights strung around bars

Ashes of smoke in a burned out jar

One point five liters of Woodbridge reprieval 

Upheaval in a heart gone wild.

You say Patty sings and speaks for you

While her words hold so much truth

There are meanings found in everything

When searching in the dark.

We fought too hard to end up here

You sitting there

And me sitting here

Both in the air

One hundred miles apart

You within and

Me without

Let's build an airplane; fill in the cracks

With gold from the stars and grace for the past

This is a story that belongs in a song

You are the Johnny to my June.

We fought too hard to end up here

You sitting there

And me sitting here

Both in the air

One hundred miles apart

You within and

Me without

Maybe you'll forget to remember to forget me.